"Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone
quickly to whom he can hand over that great gift of freedom with which the ill-fated
creature is born."

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Fyodor Dostoyevsky, "The
Grand Inquisitor"

It is heartening to know that there are young children still
reading books. While a growing majority
of parents, who aren't, have been seduced into destroying their children's
imaginations by placing them in front of screens, there are still holdouts who
realize that if their children are ever to become free- thinking adults, they
must grow up expanding their minds in the meditative space of beautiful
literature on paper pages. Only there will they find the freedom to
dream, to stop and close their eyes as they travel through unknown realms of
wonder.

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I know young children who are doing that; my grandchildren
are. They are doing a most dangerous
thing: they are thinking. They are purposely cut-off from the madding crowd
that is lost in the disorienting madness of electronic cyberspace.

I have seen some children reading a book that has them
thinking about the meaning of freedom, what it means to be an autonomous and courageous
individual in a country in which brainwashing has been refined to a fine
psychological art, and normality has been proffered as a great achievement by a
corporate media serving as stenographers for the power elite. They are learning a profound lesson: that the
crowd is untruth and that to be a person one must of necessity stand out.

No, they are not reading Kierkegaard, Orwell, or Dostoevsky. They are reading a writer who sounds the same
themes but speaks the language of 9-12 year olds, a supremely intelligent
writer of beautiful prose who never condescends to write down to them. They are reading Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.

"You should read it, Papa," my daughter said to me decades
ago when she had read it. "You would
really like it."

Valuing her judgment and knowing she was asking me to share
an experience she felt important to us both, I did just that. And I can gladly report that it is a book of
profound importance, a beautiful and exciting "children's" book for children of
all ages. I found in reading and
rereading it that I better understood the pressures to conform, to give up the
struggle for an essential self, that my twelve-year- old daughter and other young
people were subjected to. Those pressures,
aided and abetted by today's nefarious high-tech social media and their
promoters, have increased a hundred-fold. It is supremely ironic that the
pressures to conform that L'Engle wrote about in 1962, when the book was
published, have become so much more intense because those who became adults in
the following years became such conformists themselves by embracing all the
high-tech gadgetry they have subsequently placed in their children's vulnerable
hands. Books may help one become a Self,
but freedom's just another word for most people of any era, who far prefer
being part of the crowd and losing themselves in it.

From L'Engle's book I came to see anew the meaning of love
and respect for people -- their sacred, inviolable dignity -- that means nothing
to tyrants of all sorts who manipulate and abuse people to satisfy their
machinations. Rather than just being
obvious and crude, today these tyrants are part and parcel of a triumphant therapeutic,
celebrity culture that advises: "Just
relax and don't fight and it will be much easier for you. Don't stress." In other words, shrink to fit. But their guile and bad faith is so
sophisticated that their conformism is advertised as freedom and
self-affirmation. "Don't shrink to fit."
"Be yourself." "Be Free." Every school child in the country is urged to become
"a critical thinker," as they are molded to the rule of group think that
dominates the nation's schools. When all
have achieved the pedagogues' goal of "critical thinking," there will be no independent
thinkers among them.

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Since 1962, A Wrinkle in Time has sold over 14 million copies. In its essence it is the story of Meg Murry,
a young teenager who feels dumb and ugly and very different from her schoolmates,
and who, as fate decrees, must set out on a long journey in search of her true
self. "I hate being an oddball," she
says, "I try to pretend, but it isn't any help."

Her "problem" is that she is too straightforward and can't,
unlike so many of those around her, pretend to be what she isn't, a phony
actor. She values honesty over pretense,
but finds this is not the way of the so-called normal world, where pretense and
living lies prevail. Luckily for her,
however, she has a highly precocious and independent five-year-old brother,
Charles Wallace, who loves and understands her better than she does herself,
and whose support is instrumental in her finally coming to accept and celebrate
her own uniqueness and how it is tied to the search for truth in all things.

As the story begins, Meg is confused and hurt because
someone or something has caused her father, to whom she is extremely close, to
disappear. She misses and yearns for
him, but no one, including her mother, can or will tell her anything about his
mysterious disappearance. Authority
figures, such as the school principal, urge her to give him up for dead,
something she adamantly refuses to do.

So with the help of Charles Wallace with his uncanny powers,
they meet three wonderful and mysterious figures -- Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and
Mrs. Which. This trinity helps them
travel through space and time to the planet Camazotz where their father, a
scientist, is held captive by the malign force IT, a pulsing brain that has
brainwashed all the inhabitants into being identical automatons with no wills
of their own. On Camazotz everyone is
comatose; it is a place where everyone has given in, where everyone is alike
and no differences are allowed. The
brainwasher, IT, the ultimate tyrant, has convinced people to hand over their
freedom and wills for a painless existence. It tells the children: